Grayson's head had finally gotten itself sorted out. This project was bigger than he would ever be. He had to stop thinking of himself as a protagonist. He was a catalyst, at best. He had already found that the stresses of a collapsing ecosystem was enough to drive evolution into overdrive.
All the evolutionary explosions of the past would pale in comparison to what he was about to unleash. Never before had the Earth had access to genetic engineering technology. The slow pace of mutation, even when sped up by cataclysmic climate shifts, was just a blip on the screen. Being able to mix and match wildly different species adaptations and not wait for random ones to show themselves... that would be orders of magnitude more powerful.
It was a funny thought, but the people of the future would have all the evidence they needed to prove that life was intelligently designed. Grayson, as an atheist raised by atheists, would at least incorporate his story into the very DNA of the life he created. That was a simple technology developed in the 1990s when genetic engineering was in its infancy. The DNA of a single cell was said to be able to hold the equivalent information of the sum total of all human knowledge at that time. As long as the future people could read it, a very high fidelity copy of the true story would be in nearly every cell nucleus on Earth. That should keep anyone from manufacturing a superstitious religion from the evidence of tinkering all around.
It was time to get to work. Grayson started by setting his printer to produce copies of itself. He would let that progress for a few generations. Each new printer continuing to copy itself as well. On average the copy time for a new printer was 1 week, so after a few months he should have a small army of printers working on new projects.
Grayson busied himself with feeding the recycler in the meantime. The drop pod was nearly gone. He had several barrels of raw atomic feed stock. Each labelled carefully, as it just looked like the finest white powder in each. Likewise he loaded barrels with his organic sludge from the bioreactor pit. Just a fancy label for a liquid compost pile, in Grayson's opinion. Though, there were some nanobots thrown in to actually do a more thorough job of breaking things down to simple organic molecules, like fats and sugars.
Next Grayson rounded up a lot of the chalky detritus of his modified ferns and kelps. That stuff was going to be super useful as a feed stock for ceramics. Super conductors would always need various ceramic alloys and his plans would need lots of super conductors.
After 3 weeks, Grayson had 8 printers online and he decided to set one to making further recyclers. His production pace couldn't be kept up with just one anymore. He also had another printer making drones. Grayson planned to start actively spreading his ferns to the mainlands. Super capacitor powered drones carrying billions of fern spores all over the planet would help scale up this project considerably.
'If I didn't know my own motivations, I'd probably think I look a lot like a super villain at this point. Living on a remote island base, making global scale plans and implementing them with no supervision or oversight...' Grayson was having a few twinges of doubt already, but he had to keep telling himself that this was still barely even making a change on the global scale. His mind just wasn't used to thinking of the size of the Earth, as he had always seen it from far away while barely traveling more than a thousand miles total in his life.
All the printers on autopilot and several autonomous drones doing his gathering for him, now Grayson knew it was time to design some major lifeforms. He needed help and so did the Earth. Maybe some animals could speed things along. He thought over the major problems of Earth right now. The oceans were so full of plastic, the water wasn't even blue anymore. Though this was an enormous amount of sequestered carbon, it was its own problem as well. Eighty percent or more of oceanic life had gone extinct on the planet. It had almost all been preserved on off-planet reserves or gene banks, but that was still unacceptable to allow to continue.
The only life that hadn't died off from the loss of generous access to sunlight was the deep ocean life which hadn't had sunlight anyway. And even most of that had died off from lack of nutrients filtering down. No, the life living from the resources of hydrothermal vents was all that was left in the water. It was likewise the end of nearly half the human population.
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This was the task Grayson set himself to first. Ocean based animal life. He needed to first design something that could gather and break down all that plastic into something more readily useful. There were microbes that seemed able to at least simplify the long molecules into shorter ones and feed on them, but they worked very slowly and didn't seem to get very much energy from this. If they had, they would have taken over the world by now with all the plastics humans had put into it. So Grayson gathered samples from the ever-present microplastics he could find. He isolated the various microbes on them and sequenced those genomes.
Grayson then applied those snips of code identified to produce the plastic breaking enzymes into a jellyfish like creature. He added a bit of chlorophyll production and eventually managed a plantlike animal of zero intelligence. It would simply cruise the ocean currents taking energy from sunlight and from plastics that it gathered into its vast sticky network of tentacles. He gave it a growth cycle like a hydra. It could thus go through multiple life stages. Each one gathering plastics in different regions of the water column. It also incidentally had the only known method for immortality. As it could reverse its growth stages to rejuvenate its telomeres.
Grayson was like a mad scientist in his lab. Working his hands like some magician to the images only he could see in the air around him. Egg had crafted a detailed visual interpretation of the gene modification instructions such that it was intuitive. This allowed Grayson the ability to make the cognitive leaps humans were so well suited for when it came to creative tool use. He could zoom into specific aspects of a creature and dig out the core codes that represented those aspects. Pull and place, shape and mold. He worked at the images in his vision like working with clay. Sometimes the simulations would go a little fuzzy when the combinations might result in something unknown. Grayson tried to reduce those uncertainties where he could.
It took days or weeks of work for each lifeform design, and several more to produce an effective supply of embryos. By this time Grayson had hundreds of working printers and he could make truly massive numbers of slightly varied individual embryos to allow for a population to immediately get started.
Grayson released his plastic jellies into the ocean via drone delivery. He had tried to add in a symbiotic relationship with several of the microbes that also break down plastics. That was one of the fuzzy changes, though and he had no idea if it would work. If so, his jellyfish would be like floating power supplies for colonies of plastic eating microbes. Letting them feed each other some of the byproducts. The jellyfish flotillas could even grow larger with the carbon dioxide waste from the plastic breakdown, like any plant, using the sunlight to convert some of that to sugars and other complex organics. Grayson hoped that this complex creation would become a major nutrient provider for the whole ocean eventually. Turning the waste of humans into the bounty of the Sea.
Next on his agenda had been to craft a similar core nutrient producer for the land. Animal/plant hybrids seemed like the way to go for this sort of foundation of the food chain. Grayson wanted to make something that truly would count as a superfood. Something so nutritionally dense that it could feed a highly active animal for days after just a single meal. It would be very expensive from a metabolic perspective, so it would need to have several symbiotic caretaker relationships.
This sort of existence couldn't possibly survive on its own. There was no way to get so much surplus energy alone and also carve out one's own survival. It couldn't be a mobile thing, wasting vast energy on moving around. So a tree would be the most likely base model. It would need the ability to process inputs like an animal, however. Just sunlight, air and water wouldn't cut it, for this kind of food producer. This thing would need an omnivorous diet. Maybe even more flexible than a human's digestive setup.
What Grayson had finally decided on was a fast growing, root propagating, omnivorous tree with an actual digestive tract. It produced a highly addictive sap, that acted almost like a mind control drug on several species of small reptiles and insects. They were able to endure the climate better than mammals and had less need for food themselves. But they had a drug induced urge to gather food of any kind and bring it to the trees. Even going so far as to give themselves to the tree when their bodies were too frail to gather anymore.
The tree would be massive, since most of a tree's mass was from the carbon in the air after all. And it produced a dense sort of fruit with a highly durable skin. It could last for weeks without harm once removed from the tree and could keep even a human alive and completely nutritionally satisfied for days per fruit.